Vendela Vida '85

Vendela Vida '85 was the 2010 Distinguished Alumna Award Recipient.

Vendela is a journalist, editor, screenplay writer, educator, and the award-winning author of six books, including Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, and the national bestseller We Run the Tides. She also co-edited The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, as well as Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence. As a screenwriter, she collaborated with her husband Dave Eggers on the screenplay for the 2009 film Away We Go, a comedy-drama directed by Sam Mendes and co-starring John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph. 

Two of Vendela’s novels have been New York Times notable books of the year. She is also the winner of the 2007 Kate Chopin Award, given to a writer whose female protagonist chooses an unconventional path. Her quarterly literature, arts, and culture magazine, The Believer, of which she is a founding editor, is a thirteen-time National Magazine Award finalist. 

 

Vendela received her bachelor’s degree in English from Middlebury College and her Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University. She lives in the Bay Area with her family. 

Q & A: *This interview took place on February 5, 2018.*

I wanted to be a journalist covering international relations. I don’t know if I was 100% sure what “international relations” meant, but I liked the sound of it. 

Stockholm. My mother is from a small town in Sweden, so we go back and visit a lot, and we always spend time in Stockholm. I like taking the ferries between Stockholm’s 14 islands, and my kids love the Vasa Museum, which is home to a beautiful 17th-century ship that sank on its first voyage. When your kids are jetlagged and wake up at 3:30 a.m., that museum is perfect. It opens at 8:30 a.m., so you only have 5 hours to kill. 

I had so many thoughtful, kind, generous and talented teachers, so it’s hard to choose. I’ll just list the first few memories that come to mind. I loved that Ms. Scattergood taught us about Sumerian ziggurats and told us that it was rude to brush our hair in public—and she did both of these on the same day! I think of her whenever I see a ziggurat or someone brushing their hair in a public space. I remember Ms. Fleishhacker teaching us about Hitchcock films during an intersession class; Ms. Mosheim inspiring us to write stories about a place called the Glum Factory; Madame Wagner introducing us to buche de Noël; Mrs. Johnston sharing stories with us about her (then) baby and how her baby loved listening to “Walking on the Moon” by The Police; Mrs. Clark telling us about her years in the Peace Corps; and a young creative writing teacher we had who showed up one day a few minutes late to class. She walked into the classroom in a full scuba-diving outfit and said, “Write a story about what happened to me and how I got here.”

First of all, a chef, given that I don’t cook very well. Then, it seems the most important person is the one who knows when to call it a night. My father was masterful. I remember dinner parties that my parents would have for their friends when my sister Vanessa and I were growing up. When it was time for everyone to leave, my father would clap his hands together once, stand up and say, “Well, that was a great evening!”

Be kind. I can’t emphasize enough how important I believe it is that women support other women; it’s just as essential—if not more so—that girls support other girls.